Can you give an approximate release date
Viewing post in Heroic Harem Resort (18+) comments
That's perfectly fine since IRL takes priority, but please make an official announcement for stuff like that to keep people informed. Kind of a pain to have to check comments for that instead of just getting the info in my feed. No need for a long explanation of why it's delayed, but just a simple few lines stating that there is a delay but that the project isn't dead. Communicating with your community is key to keeping said community engaged.
Gotta fight the current trend of indie devs not being communicative and just vanishing for months. It hurts the entire scene.
I see where you're coming from, but I've mentioned before (not just in comments) that update 0.2 would be more of a "when it's done" update anyway, since it'll be fairly big, so it was always going to be at least 2, more likely 3 months even in a best-case scenario.
HHR has fairly many characters right off the bat, and I want to avoid the situation of Corrupted Kindoms' Act 3 in its early days, where it took several updates before it was really playable and had any content worth mentioning.
It would be a different story if the game was already on a regular release cadence, but...
in this case, an announcement would've amounted to "instead of I don't know when, it's now I don't know when +1 month or so".
I guess one could argue I should've done more pre-production, better planning, released 0.1 later etc., but hindsight is 20/20.
Also, I'm an introvert, I only communicate when I feel I have to and prefer to focus on the actual game development.
You won't see me fix that trend, I'm afraid ^^'
That being said, starting with 0.3 the plan is to have an update at least every 5-6 weeks, and any delays to that would be announced, yes.
Fair points. It's just that it's quite easy to forget which game dev mentioned he is gonna need 2-3 months for an update and which didn't, especially when you follow a lot of games. I don't have a problem with waiting 3 months for an update if the quality is worth it. As I said I really just wanna know that the development is still in progress so there is a point in waiting (and potentially supporting a project finacially).
I fully agree on the part about avoiding a situation where there is too little content to fill an update. Many sandbox games do that and it's honestly a massive pain, especially if there is a weekday mechanic. Ended up in situations way too often where I had to spamclick through almost a full week just to get to the next event.
Instead of "I don't know when + 1 month", I was really just thinking a short one or two sentence post saying "Still no ETA, but I'm (still) working on things." And maybe add something like "x words/renders/scenes/whatever have been added/made/created so far" or "here, have a random new pic that shows I'm working on stuff yet doesn't really spoiler anything".
Oh, didn't intend to critisize your pre-production, planning or whatever. Any kind of creative work is hard to plan out far in advance. I was really just aiming my complaint at the lack of regular communication. Which brings me to your point about being an introvert. Nothing wrong with that, I'm honestly quite similar. The only reason I even brought this up to begin with is that many indie devs are currently being far too uncommunicative and just leave their communities hanging without regular updates (not playable updates, but really just dev logs or any kind of sign of life). At this point this trend is getting so annoying that I felt I had to speak up about it and you were really just unfortunate to be one of the first devs I brought this up with. It's just a massive pain if you are following dozens of projects like I do and for more and more of them you don't know if they are just held up by IRL stuff and/or a particularly big update or if they abandoned their project without a word, simply because the devs don't give regular short progress updates/reports.